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Appnovation Technologies

Appnovation Technologies, Acquia and Alfresco partner for osCaddie

Acquia supplies a crucial piece of the open source puzzle

Founded in 2007 by Arnold Leung as a Drupal shop, Appnovation Technologies has grown into a comprehensive IT services company focusing on open source solutions. Responding to client demands, the company’s offerings include web, mobile and intranet development services.

Through the years, Appnovation has tried several approaches to providing hosting and ongoing support for their clients. After partnering with several other hosting companies, in mid 2011, Appnovation’s leadership made the decision to channel all their Drupal business through Acquia
“As we grew, we began to see more value in partnering with Acquia for hosting and support; Acquia’s services allow us to provide our clients true end to end Drupal solutions.”
– Arnold Leung, Founder and CEO at Appnovation

How they did it

Appnovation has always been centered on Drupal, for its security, extensibility and popularity with clients. When a client needs to extend beyond Drupal, Appnovation innovators reach out to other open source resources. Drupal’s flexibility allows for integration with almost any other platform.

Due to all the integration opportunities available and how important partnerships with these technology companies are in terms of driving revenue, James Heise, Director of Business Development at Appnovation, took on a new role early in 2011. Leaving sales duties to highly skilled new team members from the likes of Hewlett Packard and Alfresco, Heise would concentrate on developing the various partnerships critical to Appnovation’s success.

From this change grew a renewed interest in working with Acquia. “We were one of the first Acquia partners back in 2008, but we were so busy with business that we didn’t fully develop the relationship. In mid 2011, we made a conscious decision to grow our partnership with Acquia. With our core business focused on Drupal, Acquia just makes sense. Their team is very talented across the board, which helps immensely,” recalls Heise.

Acquia’s Drupal optimized hosting and 24/7 support fill the needs of the largest business class client. Appnovation developers also benefit from the Acquia partnership. “Our developers love using Acquia Dev Cloud, and we highly recommend it to all our clients. Besides being a great development platform, it reduces cost of implementation and makes deployment much simpler,” says Heise.

“The partnership with Acquia is a two way street. We work closely with the sales team, and they know the quality of our work. We recommend them, they recommend us. Acquia, being the commercial support of Drupal, gives open source, Drupal and Appnovation more credibility, which means we can also close more business on our own. We want long term customer relationships with happy clients, and our connection with Acquia facilitates that.”

The results

The partnership has really paid off, both for Appnovation and for Acquia. By late in 2011, Appnovation was promoted to an Enterprise level partner, and in January of 2012, they were promoted again to the highest services partner category, Enterprise Select. Appnovation’s projected 2012 annual revenue is twice the revenue of 2011, and much of this growth can be attributed directly to the alliance with Acquia.

The partnership has also contributed to the development of new solutions. Heise explains, “We are one of the few companies that partners with both Alfresco, an open source document management system, and Acquia. After developing several Drupal/ Alfresco implementations for clients, we realized that developing a standard solution integrating the two would accelerate implementation at no cost for future clients. We worked with Acquia and Alfresco to make it happen.

“In the process of developing this best in class technology, known as osCaddie, we brought Acquia and Alfresco closer together. We see open source as a single movement. Because open source technologies use open standards, many can work together. This capability to integrate various technologies makes open source competitive with proprietary companies across the board. Drupal provides the best web content management system out there.

“We are now working on a large osCaddie project. When that is complete, we will release an open source version of osCaddie available to everybody.”

Heise adds, “Acquia has been tremendous for our business and helped up grow really quickly. The sales team has been awesome, the marketing team has been awesome, everyone has treated us really well. We are looking forward to working together well into the future.”

Our vision is developing open source solutions centered on Drupal. Acquia has played a big part in bringing that vision to reality.